Outrage over New York Post front page showing man about to be killed by Subway train

Nikhil Kumar

Nikhil Kumar is The Independent's New York correspondent. He was formerly assistant editor on the foreign desk and has also done a variety of jobs on the city desk, where he wrote about markets, commodities and other business and economics topics.

Imagine the scene. A train is pulling into a busy New York subway station near Times Square. On the platform is the usual big city jumble of commuters and wide-eyed tourists. But in a horrific departure from the norm, there is a man on the track, moments away from certain death. What do you do?

If you're R Umar Abbasi, a freelance photographer for the New
York Post who was on the mid-town platform as such a scene unfolded
on Monday, you wield your camera.

"I had my camera up. It wasn't even set to the right settings
and I just kept shooting and flashing, hoping the train driver
would see something and be able to stop," Mr Abbasi said,
recounting the tragic event.

Right settings or not, Mr Abbasi managed to capture a clear
image of Ki-Suck Han, the man on the platform. Moments later, Mr
Han was fatally run over by a Q-Train. And the next day, Mr
Abbasi's newspaper published an oversized record of the scene on
its front page, prompting questions about the rights and wrongs of,
first, capturing such an image and, once the die has been cast,
publishing it with a bombastic headline.

Today, police in New York arrested and charged Naeem Davis,
a 30-year-old homeless man who had been taken in for questioning on
Tuesday, for the death of Mr Han. Mr Davis , who was reported to
have several prior arrests on his record, was detained on a charge
of second degree murder after police tracked him down based on
leads from a security video and he is said to have implicated
himself in the death of Mr Han, 58, during questioning.

Meanwhile, questions were being asked about the New York Post's
decision to publish the image of the scene with the headline:
"DOOMED". A subheading above said: "Pushed on the track, this man
is about to die".

David Carr, the long-standing media commentator at the New York
Times, couldn't have been clearer on where he stood. "The treatment
of the photo was driven by a moral and commercial calculus that was
sickening to behold," he wrote in a blog post yesterday.

At ProPublica, the investigative journalism non-profit
organisation, reporter Charles Ornstein tweeted that the cover
image "crosses the line". "A pic of a man pushed onto a subway
track right before he is struck and killed. Grim," he said in what
was one of many messages critiquing the image posted by users on
the micro-blogging website.

The photographer, Mr Abbasi, also faced criticism despite his
defence that he was using the camera to alert the subway driver. In
a piece for the Post, he wrote: "The victim was so far away from
me, I was already too far away to reach him when I started running.
The train hit the man before I could get to him, and nobody closer
tried to pull him out."

Mr Abbasi added: "I have to say I was surprised at the anger
over the pictures... But I can't let the armchair critics bother
me. They were not there. They have no idea how very quickly it
happened... People think I had time to set the camera and take
photos, and that isn't the case. I just ran toward that train."

John Cook, at US online blog network Gawker Media, sounded a
note of scepticism about the account, saying it was "amazing" that
Mr Abbasi "took a focused composed pic" of Mr Han "even [though] he
says he was just using [the] flash to warn."

But Vincent Laforet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, said
he was taking Mr Abassi's explanation at face value. "If he felt he
could not physically make it to the man... firing his flash to get
the operator's attention may have been his only recourse," he told
Gawker Media.

Moreover, he made the case that recording disturbing events, in
instances where intervention is not possible, "can be a necessary
act that could potentially prevent it from happening to others in
the future".

He added: "In this particular case, it appears that little could
have been done to save this man in time."

A representative for the New York Post did not immediately
respond to a request for comment today.